Overview
When I took on this project, I wanted to create a cohesive series that utilized images to embrace cuteness and femininity. I chose the collectable figurines, Sonny Angels, as the subject, and used the ladybug Sonny Angel as my jumping off point. I then decided it would be interesting to create a love story between the Sonny Angels in a triptych. It’s hard to ignore how the fabrication department is mainly made up of men. For women identifying fabricators, this creates a feeling of being out of place or unwelcome. My project aims to contradict the masculine and often intimidating energy in the fabrication lab by creating something so undeniably girly and feminine that it’s a celebration of the female minority of fabricators. I used grasshopper and photoshopped images to create my project.
Process
First, I selected a picture of the ladybug Sonny Angel, and altered the brightness/contrast until it would have the best quality possible when plugged into grasshopper. I used a piece of code provided to the class that transforms an image into a grasshopper drawing. I created an image of the Ladybug and Butterfly Sonny Angels holding hands. From there, I wanted them to be surrounded by a heart. I found a YouTube tutorial for how to make a heart using the expression command. From there, I downloaded the plug-in Pufferfish to use the “move-to-point” command to make the heart surrounding the Sonny Angels made up of smaller hearts. From there, everything was scaled to the size of the printer and ready to go. However, the printer had broken and I wasn’t able to print my design. I wanted to showcase my progress so I baked what I had finished into Rhino, and printed a giant poster of what I had done on the Graphtec Plotter. After that, I had a small amount of time to play around with the idea of a triptych. I made additional files that were just the Sonny Angel’s heads centered inside the heart. I then realized there was an issue with the heart I made, and it wasn’t perfectly symmetrical which led to a problem when it printed. With a lot of help, a modified the code so it divided the heart into a series of points, selected points at the top and bottom center, connected them to make a curve, and them mirrored that curve to make a perfect heart. From there, I separated the file into 2 gcodes: the heart, and the Sonny Angels which allowed me to print them with different colored pens.
